Rethinking Pitt-Rivers:
Analysing the Activities of a 19th-Century Collector

The Pitt Rivers Museum is pleased to announce that an application to The
Leverhulme Trust for funding of a project to 'rethink Pitt-Rivers' has been
successful. The three-year project commenced in September 2009.

The project's
principal applicant was Jeremy Coote, Chris Gosden was the co-applicant.
Alison Petch will be the Researcher on the project.

Ever since the completion
of an earlier Leverhulme-funded project devoted to the founding collection
of the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM), we have had three
interrelated concerns:
• that we know so little about Pitt-Rivers’s collecting
activities in general and about his ‘second’ collection in particular;
•
that scholarly and popular understandings of Pitt-Rivers and his collections
have been distorted by the existence of a museum in Oxford that bears his
name but was never ‘his’ and is filled with other people’s collections;
•
that scholarly and popular understandings of the PRM have been skewed by
its nominal connections with a man of supposedly fixed ideas.
Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers (1827-1900)
towards the end of his life. 1998.271.66

This project
is designed to address these concerns. In particular, the project is designed
to provide the scholarly community and the wider public with a detailed account
and understanding of the collecting activities of Lieutenant-General Augustus
Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers (1827–1900). A scholarly database of all Pitt-Rivers’s
collections will be created and made available online for the benefit of
the research community and the wider public. This will then be used by the
project team as the basis for researching and writing a grounded, narrative
history of Pitt-Rivers’s activities as a collector. This will have his acquisitions
at its core, but will provide an account of all his collections-related activities—as
a lecturer, author, cataloguer, exhibiter, museum creator, thinker, and theorist.
The project’s main objective is to ‘rethink’ Pitt-Rivers, by exploring the
full range of his collecting activities in greater detail and depth than
has been attempted previously. To gain this objective, a series of other
objectives must be achieved. The first is to gain a clear picture of his
entire collections. This will be achieved through the creation of a comprehensive,
scholarly, computerized, publicly accessible database of the entire collection,
including digital images of the ‘Farnham’ manuscript catalogues. The database
will be used to analyse statistically the entire collection to identify patterns
and changes in Pitt-Rivers’s collecting behaviour. This work will enable
the project team to test the hypothesis that Pitt-Rivers’s attitude to collecting
and to the artefacts he collected changed fundamentally over time. This database
and the statistical analyses will be at the heart of a project website that
will also provide access to original and reprinted articles, progress reports,
and links to related resources. In addition to creating the website, the
project team will publicly disseminate the research findings through a workshop,
a conference and related edited volume, academic papers, and a monograph.